The argument is relatively straightforward — relative, that is, to the average Anscombe argument. Suppose we have the inference pattern:

A→B

B→C

A

Therefore: C.

This looks like a piece of theoretical reasoning. From A, and from the relevant entailments, we’re able to conclude C. Suppose that A is “the potatoes have been in the oven for 20 minutes”, B is “the potatoes are cooked”, and C is “the potatoes are ready to eat”. If we know that A, we know that A entails B, and we know that B entails C, then we know that C.

Suppose, on the other hand, that C is something we‘re aiming at bringing about (we’re cooking potatoes). We can use the same inference to decide to bring about A. Now the inference looks like this:

Aiming at: C.

A→B

B→C

Therefore: bring it about that A.

The formal inference is the same. What makes it practical is nothing about the logical form, but only what we’re using that inference for.

What prevents some logicians from seeing this, says Anscombe, is a misguided idea about necessity. In the theoretical case, there appears to be a logical compulsion that is absent in the practical case. No reasonable person can accept the premises without accepting the conclusion. In the practical case, by contrast, there does not appear to be the same necessity. There might, for all the inference shows, be a way to bring it about that C without bringing it about that A. Thus aiming at bringing about C does not compel bringing about A.

Anscombe argues that this is a false distinction. If “compulsion” means “compulsion according to the norms of inference”, then we can say that the norms of practical inference compel bringing it about that A when C is desired, just as the norms of theoretical inference compel believing C when A is believed. It might not represent the only way to bring about C, but then the theoretical inference might not represent the only way to conclude that C. Meanwhile if “compulsion” means “psychological compulsion”, then we must admit that neither the theoretical nor the practical inference is compelling: people reason badly both theoretically and practically.

There is much more to be said, and Anscombe deals with various objections. But the conclusion is that the form of the inference is the same in the practical and in the theoretical case. What makes the difference between practical and theoretical reasoning is what we use the inference for rather than its form.

Anscombe is discussing what Aristotle calls “practical syllogism” in the ‘common books’ of the Nichomachean and Eudemian Ethics. Aristotle uses “συλλογισμος” to mean simply “reasoning”; there is no strong compulsion to suppose him to be talking about the more specific syllogistic theory of inference found in the Prior Analytics. And yet the examples that Aristotle gives of practical syllogisms can be read in line with that theory.

Anscombe moves right away to a logic of propositions rather than to a logic of terms. But Aristotle’s examples can be analysed in terms of the logic of terms proposed in his syllogistic. Here is one of them (more or less):

As stated, the syllogism clearly isn’t valid under the rules of the Prior Analytics. But the obvious reason for this obscures the more interesting reason.

The obvious reason is that the conclusion mentions something that isn’t in any of the premises: my action of eating something. If the argument is a sorites, then the conclusion should be: “I benefit from dry food”. The moral philosopher can bring in all sorts of Humean quibbles about whether this is sufficient on its own to compel any action.

But the logician might be at least equally interested in the way the terms are divided up. Let me represent the inference, with the modified conclusion, putting subject-terms in round brackets and predicate-terms in square brackets. The copulas I leave out. Then we have:

(Human beings) [benefit from dry food].

(I) [human being].

(This bread) [dry food].

Therefore: (I) [benefit from dry food].

For the syllogism to be valid (as a sorites), we would need four terms, to match our four propositions. But what we have here is five terms. “Dry food” is not the same term as “benefit from dry food”. If we treat the two terms as equivalent, we can end up with one of the following valid but nonsensical soriteses:

Humans beings benefit from dry food.

I am a human being.

Benefit from dry food is this bread.

Therefore I am this bread.

Or:

Human beings are dry food.

I am a human being.

This bread is dry food.

Therefore I am this bread.

The conclusion is the same in each sorites. And it is decidedly not what we want from our practical reasoning.

What causes us the trouble is that “benefits” belongs to the matter and not the form of the syllogism. It goes into one of the terms, giving us one too many terms for our sorites.

One way of getting “benefits” out of the matter of the syllogism would be to treat it as syncategorematic. Thus in “humans benefit from dry food”, we could say, the subject is “humans” and the predicate is “dry food”, while “benefits” expresses the way in which the predicate belongs to the subject.

But does “benefits” then express the quantity or the quality of the proposition? Since the proposition appears straightforwardly affirmative, “benefits” does not seem to express a new quality. It might, then, express quantity. But how? In addition to saying dry food belongs to all humans and dry food belongs to some humans, can we also say that dry food belongs tobenefit humans?

This seems bizarre on the face of it, but there might be something in it. Michael Thompson’s Life and Actionproposes that in order to understand practical reasoning, we need a new “logical form”. From the way he describes it, what he seems to want is a new quantifier. To use Geach’s example, “acorns grow into trees” is a true proposition meaning neither thatall acorns grow into trees nor merely that some acorns grow into trees. The first is false; the second is not quite what is meant, since “grow into oaks” isn’t just something that happens to belong to acorns; it belongs to themessentially: it is part of the ‘life-form’ of acorns that they grow into oaks.

Most philosophers would say that the reference to ‘life-form’ here is categorematic; it expresses a non-logical relation between acorns and the activity of growing into oaks. But Thompson’s Hegelian proposal is that when we begin talking about living things, we introduce at least one newlogical form. There is a distinct logical relation between subject and predicate, when we predicate an activity that belongs to the ‘life-form’ of a living thing.

This works, I have proposed, like a quantifier. It is not that all acorns grow into oaks, nor merely that some acorns grow into oaks, nor even that mostacorns grow into oaks (they don’t). Rather, acorns grow into oaks ‘life-form-wise’, where the latter expression introduces a distinct quantifier not recognised in standard predicate or plurative logic.

In Aristotelian terms, it expresses a way in which the predicate belongs to the subject, a way that is neither universal nor particular.

This can, I think, be used to make sense of the Aristotelian practical syllogism. If we rush to the solution, here is what we might do. First, take “b” as a strange sort of belonging that a predicate can have to a subject, expressed by the word “benefits”. Now we can assign the terms of the sorites in this way:

A: humans

B: dry food

C: me

D: this bread

The form of the sorites will then be (taking the quantity of singular propositions to be universal): AbB, CaA, ∴CbB, DaB, ∴CbD. I represent the sorites again putting subjects in round brackets, predicates in square, and now syncategorematic terms in italics:

Benefit (human beings) [dry food]

All (I) [human being]

All (This bread) [dry food]

Benefit (I) [dry food]

Note that the form is the same as what it would be if the ‘quantity’-term “benefit” were replaced with “all”. But then we’d get the absurd conclusion that dry food belongs to me in the standard way that a predicate belongs to a subject — that “dry food” is either a class to which I belong or a property of me.

But since we have taken “benefit” out of the matter of the syllogism and placed it into the form, it can modify the copula. It modifies it by causing it to express a relation of benefiting rather than a relation of class-membership, identity, or predication.

This is extremely radical. It makes the relation of benefiting into a logical relation! And it is much more radical than what Thompson proposes. He wants activities to be predicated of subjects in the normal way, but subject to a strange quantifier.

We can get to something more like what he is after by going a bit more slowly. First, we replace “dry food” and “this bread” by “eating dry food” and “eating this bread”. We still need the extra quantifier, since what we want to say is that those activities belong to the subject in a very particular way, as pertaining to its ‘life-form’ and not just to some or all or most of its extension. But now it looks much more like a quantity-term than “benefits”, which seemed to change the relation of predication into something else entirely.

Suppose we use the adverb “ideally” to express this special sort of quantity (as we might say that “ideally” acorns grow into oak trees). The resulting sorites is:

Ideally (human beings) [eat dry food]

All (I) [human being]

All (Eat this bread) [eat dry food]

Ideally (I) [eat dry food]

The sorites would be equally valid if “ideally” were replaced by “all”, but then it wouldn’t look like a practical syllogism at all. The conclusion would be an assertion about what I do, whereas here the conclusion looks like a recommendation. And it would anyway be bad practical reasoning to move from what everyone does to what I ought to do: e.g., everyone screws up sometimes.

I do not mean to disagree with Anscombe, however (I rarely do). It is stillnot the case that it is the form that makes this syllogism practical. Having certain propositions in the form, “P belongs to S ideally” is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for a syllogism to be practical. Take, for instance, the syllogism:

Ideally swallows migrate for winter.

These birds are sparrows.

Therefore: Ideally they migrate for winter.

I might be using this inference to decide what to do, but I am more likely to be making a prediction about what the birds will do. It is still the case that what makes an inference practical is what we want to do with it and not its form as such. But now it is the case that practical inferences have to be of a certain form; they have to contain propositions of the right quantity.

Another question is whether an inference of the right form, of which I am the subject of the conclusion, is necessarily practical. Does a conclusion about what I ideally do have to involve some recommendation that I do something? Here moral philosophy begins, and I run away.

]]>https://originofspecious.wordpress.com/2016/10/26/8976/feed/0axdouglasbiridans-ass(Part 2) Collingwood’s Revolution in Logichttps://originofspecious.wordpress.com/2016/09/08/part-2-collingwoods-revolution-in-logic/
https://originofspecious.wordpress.com/2016/09/08/part-2-collingwoods-revolution-in-logic/#respondThu, 08 Sep 2016 11:08:38 +0000http://originofspecious.wordpress.com/?p=8699]]>In my last post I looked at Collingwood’s attempted revolution in logic and its anti-realist implications. Sam Lebens raised the interesting question of how the proposed revolution in the Autobiography connects with the more radical line pushed in the Essay on Metaphysics.

The theory in the Autobiography is, if I interpreted it rightly, relatively simple. Truth-bearers become question-answer complexes rather than propositions. Their truth-values depend on the answer’s being the right answer to the question, defined in terms of justifiability. The Essay on Metaphysics presents a much more complex structure, involving propositions, questions to which propositions are answers, and presuppositions giving rise to questions. “Logicians”, Collingwood opines, “have paid a great deal of attention to some kinds of connexion between thoughts, but to other kinds not so much.” (23)

Collingwood lays out his theory more geometrico, in a series of propositions and definitions (don’t confuse yourself yet by asking what questions these propositions are answers to). Life is short, so I’ll only list the propositions here, except for two definitions within Proposition 3, which are important:

Every statement that anybody ever makes is made in answer to a question.

Every question involves a presupposition.

A presupposition is either relative or absolute.

(Def) By a relative presupposition I mean one which stands relatively to one question as its presupposition and relatively to another question as its answer.

(Def) An absolute presupposition is one which stands, relatively to all questions to which it is related, as a presupposition, never as an answer.

Absolute presuppositions are not propositions.

I find Collingwood’s own examples unhelpful for making much sense out of this structure. What is clear enough is that we can’t hold onto the neat structure of question-functions yielding truth or falsity with answers as arguments. Collingwood tells us that “A question that ‘does not arise’ is … a nonsense question” (26), and a question’s not arising is a matter of its involving a presupposition that is not in fact being made.

Here is a tentative attempt at a semi-formalisation. Start with the question-functions I discussed in the previous post. A question-function can be placed into another function – a presupposition-function. This generates a presupposition-question-function if the presupposition is in fact made; it generates nothing but nonsense if the presupposition is not made. Thus we begin with the question-function: Q?*. This is then given as the argument in the presupposition-function A!*, yielding the function A!Q?*. This again is then placed in a new function, C(*), yielding: C(A!Q?*). This will be meaningful – that is, it will yield truth-values when various answers are substituted for *, if the presupposition P is in fact made.

An example of a meaningful function might then be: C([All men have mothers]![Who is Nero’s mother]?*). This might be called (following Aristotle’s terminology regarding syllogisms) an imperfect function, since more information than is actually stated is needed to show how the question arises from the proposition, for instance that Nero is a man. But Collingwood does not seem particularly bothered about formal imperfection of this sort; probably he thinks (and probably rightly) that any actually presented complex will have some degree of imperfection. In this case, at any rate, various answers can be taken for * to yield truth or falsity. C([All men have mothers]![Who is Nero’s mother]?[Agripinna the Younger is Nero’s mother]) will yield truth, since the answer is right (in the sense explained in my previous post).

A meaningless complex might be: C([All dogs are cats]![Which cat is Fido the dog]?*). No answers substituted for * will produce either true or false complexes; C([All dogs are cats]![Which cat is Fido the dog]?[Fido the dog is Tibbles the cat]) is nonsense rather than a false identity statement, as it might appear to be if we attend only to the answer and not to the complex of which it is a part. A false identity statement would have to exist in a different sort of complex, e.g.: C([Some names refer to the same animal]![Do “Fido” and “Tibbles” refer to the same animal]?[“Fido” and “Tibbles” refer to the same animal]).

Collingwood wants to present metaphysics as the science of absolute presuppositions: those presuppositions which do no stand as answers to any question. In our example above, “All men have mothers” does not seem to be an absolute presupposition, since it can readily stand as the answer to a question: “Do all men have mothers?”. This is a meaningful question: we can wonder, e.g., about whether Frankenstein’s creature, having no mother, is therefore not a man.

What presupposition, actually made, gives rise to the question? This, according to Collingwood, is a matter of historical investigation into the path of inquiry taken by whoever asks the question. Perhaps the presupposition was: “Either all men have mothers or this is not the case”, in which case it looks like a candidate for an absolute presupposition. It might, however, be: “I have a mother” – supposing this, the poser of the question was, let’s say, led to an inquiry into generality. That presupposition certainly is not a candidate for an absolute presupposition; “Do I have a mother?” is a perfectly meaningful question, arising perhaps from the presupposition: “Some men have mothers”.

At any rate, Collingwood proposes that if we dig deep enough into the chain of questions and presuppositions leading up to any proposition, we will get to an absolute presupposition. Thus we end up with a complex like: A0!Q1?A1!Q2?A2!Q3?A3. The absolute presupposition A0 (I use bold font to indicate absoluteness) gives rise to question Q1, whose answer, A1, gives rise to question Q2, etc. When this whole complex is placed into the function C(*), it yields truth if the questions indeed arise from the answers, the answers are right, and the ultimate presupposition is in fact made. If C(A2!Q3?A3) yields truth, then there must be something involving an absolute presupposition, of the form C(A0!Q1?A1!Q2?A2!Q3?A3), that also yields truth.

Collingwood’s reasoning is not entirely explicit, but there seems to be a decent argument that absolute presuppositions cannot be the answers to any questions.

In standard logic there is room for debate concerning the degree to which logical deductions must begin from asserted axioms; thus the trade-off between axiomatic systems and natural deduction methods. But in the logic of question and answer, it is clear that for any question to arise at all something must be presupposed. Every chain of thought thus begins ultimately from an absolute presupposition.

But a chain of thought must presumably also end if it is to be a complete thought. Suppose, in the above example, that A3 gives rise to a new question, Q4, whose answer is A0. A0 then gives rise to Q1, whose answer gives rise to Q2, etc., until we find ourselves again at Q4. To this the answer is A0 and we begin the whole cycle again. What is happening here is that a function is taking itself as an argument: A0!Q1?A1!Q2?A2!Q3?A3!Q4?*is being taken as an argument in A0!Q1?A1!Q2?A2!Q3?A3!Q4?*. This leads to a nightmare of recursion akin to Borges’s variation on the 1001 Nights, where one fateful night Scheherezade begins to tell the tale of the 1001 Nights.

This may not lead to any formal contradiction. But I think it’s safe to say that it’s not a great look. An absolute presupposition can give rise to a series of questions and answers, which, terminating in a final answer, form a complex that can then be placed into the function C(*), to yield truth or falsity under the right conditions. If the chain turns into a nightmare recursion we never get to anything we can place into C(*).

It appears that Collingwood abandons his own principles when he states that “Every metaphysical question either is simply the question what absolute presuppositions were made on a certain occasion” (49). But in fact this is the basis of Collingwood’s argument that metaphysics – the science of absolute presuppositions – can only be an historical science. We cannot begin from our own absolute presuppositions to form chains that lead to questions to which our own absolute presuppositions are the answer. But we can form chains that lead to questions to which the absolute presuppositions of people in the past were answers.

If, e.g., A4was an absolute presupposition that was made in the past, then the chain A0!Q1?A1!Q2?A2!Q3?A3!Q4?A4does not have to become nightmarishly recursive; here, for us, A4 is not functioning as an absolute presupposition (though it had better not lead to a question whose answer is A4). Once we get to A4 we can follow the chain of thought followed by those who took it as an absolute presupposition.

Suppose A4 to be “every event has a cause” – something that, according to Collingwood, was generally presupposed in Kant’s time but is no longer generally presupposed. Once we get to A4 we can then follow the Kantian questions and answers that bloom from it: …![So there can be no primary event]?[There can be no primary event]![So the universe has no beginning in time]?[The universe has no beginning in time]![But doesn’t this lead to a contradiction, since it can also be shown that the universe must have a beginning – First Antinomy Thesis argument]?[The only possible resolution is found in Transcendental Idealism]. The last statement is the right answer to the question asked, and so the whole complex is true, but this does not mean that the last statement is itself true. A different chain, involving a question about the absolute presuppositions of a different period, would form a false complex if it terminated in the same statement.

Thus Collingwood finds it naive when historians of philosophy (or philosophers doing amateur history of philosophy) ask whether the statements made by philosophers in the past are true or false without examining the complexes in which those statements are parts. To assess a statement, one must (as Collingwood would come to say) ‘reenact’ the chain of thinking that led up to it.

Collingwood’s other conclusion is interesting: we can identify the absolute presuppositions of past ages, but not those of our own. We can’t state our own absolute presuppositions, since “every statement that anybody ever makes is made in answer to a question”, and our own absolute presuppositions can’t be answers to any of our own questions for fear of nightmarish recursion. Unlike those who will come after us, we have no hope of knowing what our absolute presuppositions are. But we can know by Collingwoodian logic that we must have some, and we can gain some insight into what they might be like by studying history.

“In logic”, writes R.G. Collingwood in his autobiography, “I am a revolutionary; and like other revolutionaries I can thank God for the reactionaries. They clarify the issue.” (52)

The revolution in logic he hoped to bring about does not seem to have come about. The matter is not helped by Collingwood’s vague and confusing way of presenting his alternative logic.

The reactionaries in his story are those who subscribe to what he calls “propositional logic”. His use of this name is apt to be somewhat confusing, since he does not mean, as most people mean by that term, the study of true and false propositions and sentential connectives. Rather, “propositional logic”, for Collingwood, is any logic that holds that propositions are truth-bearers:

According to propositional logic (under which denomination I include the so-called ‘traditional’ logic, the ‘idealistic’ logic of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the ‘symbolic’ logic of the nineteenth and twentieth), truth or falsehood, which are what logic is chiefly concerned with, belongs to propositions as such. This doctrine was often expressed by calling the proposition the ‘unit of thought’, meaning that if you divide it up into parts such as subject, copula, predicate, any of these parts taken singly is not a complete thought, that is, not capable of being true or false. (34)

Collingwood’s objection to this doctrine is not that the components of a proposition are units of thought (or what Frege simply called “Thoughts” – those items for which the question of truth arises). Rather propositions themselves have the status that the “reactionary” logicians would ascribe to subjects, predicates, etc.: they can be parts of a larger whole to which truth and falsity can be ascribed, but truth and falsity cannot be ascribed to them directly. Truth-bearers, for Collingwood, are complexes of which propositions form only a part:

It seemed to me that truth, if that meant the kind of thing which I was accustomed to pursue in my ordinary work as a philosopher or historian – truth in the sense in which a philosophical theory or an historical narrative is called true, which seemed to me the proper sense of the word – was something that belonged not to any single proposition, nor even, as the coherence-theorists maintained, to a complex of propositions taken together; but to a complex consisting of questions and answers. (37)

Collingwood implies that propositions in his logic have the same status as subject- or predicate-terms in standard logic. They can thus be presented as arguments in truth-functions, the questions being the truth-functions. For instance, the question “Who ate the eggs?” can be treated as a function that yields the value true if the proposition “Ms. Jones ate the eggs” is taken as an argument. In this way any proposition will be part of both true and false complexes. Who-ate-the-eggs?(Ms.-Jones-ate-the-eggs) will come out true, as will What-did-Ms.Jones-eat?(Ms.-Jones-ate-the-eggs), whereas Why-is-the-sky-blue?(Ms.-Jones-ate-the-eggs) will come out false. The form “Q?(x)” is meant to represent a question-function, where “Q?” specifies the question and “x” represents the argument-place into which various propositions can be inserted to yield truth or falsity to the whole complex.

To retain various benefits regarding quantification, etc., Collingwood’s logic could be made to include Frege’s functional analysis of names and predicates. Thus “xate the eggs” can be taken as a function that yields different values when different names are given as arguments for x. Unlike in the Fregean analysis, however, the values yielded will not be true and false; rather, they will be items of a logically intermediate status that yield truth and falsity when taken as the arguments in question-functions.

It is interesting to consider the anti-realist implications of this. Collingwood is hard on what he calls “realism” and connects with propositional logic in the Autobiography; in Essay on Metaphysics he claims that realism “has the grandest foundation a philosophy can have, namely, human stupidity” (34). Here, however, I mean “realism” in Michael Dummett’s sense: one is a realist about a class of propositions, roughly, if one believes that classical logic, especially bivalence, holds for them. It is not entirely clear how close realism in Dummett’s sense is to realism in Collingwood’s sense, but certainly there is a connection.

Is Collingwood’s logic anti-realist in Dummett’s sense?

One failure of classical logic for propositions is suggested by Collingwood when he implies that his logic is paraconsistent. But his choice of example to illustrate this, “The contents of this box are both one thing and many things”, is extremely unfortunate, since the contradiction turns out to be only apparent; context reveals that the first part of the statement counts sets of chessmen as things whereas the second counts individual chessmen as things. The resolution of the contradiction does not require the adoption of a non-classical logic; it requires one to recognise a point that Frege often made: a number assignment attaches to a concept or kind of thing (a Begriff, in Frege’s terminology), not to a thing directly. Collingwood provides no other examples to show that his logic can permit true contradictions in a way that classical logic cannot.

On the other hand, it is clear that one and the same proposition can contribute to both true and false question-answer complexes. Who-is-Caesar?(Caesar-is-Emperor-of-Rome) could be a true complex while Why-is-there-something-rather-than-nothing?(Caesar-is-Emperor-of-Rome) is obviously a false complex. Since the answer part of the complex is usually the only part that is explicitly articulated – according to Collingwood we need to pay attention to wider context to work out the question part – this can give the appearance of allowing for a single proposition to be both true and false at the same time. But it is only an appearance; no proposition is either true or false, and the fact that a proposition can yield both truth and falsity when taken as the argument for different functions entails no more a rejection of classical rules than the fact that a single name can have both true and false predications made of it.

There is a similar appearance of a failure of bivalence. For instance, the proposition “I have exactly 10,003 hairs on my head” would usually be thought to be either true or false. Collingwood’s logic of question and answer entails that the proposition independently of its being offered as the answer to any question has no truth-value at all. In this sense, Collingwood could be said to be an anti-realist concerning a large class of ordinary propositions.

We need to remember, however, that in ordinary usage, according to Collingwood, the utterance, “I have exactly 10,003 hairs on my head”, expresses not a proposition on its own but rather a question-answer complex (with the question expressed through the context of utterance). And then it might well be, for all Collingwood says, that the complex How-many-hairs-do-I-have-on-my-head?(I-have-exactly-10,003-hairs-on-my-head) is decisively either true or false; it may be true or false even if nobody actually asks the question. Once we accept that thoughts, in the Fregean sense, are now question-answer complexes rather than propositions, classical logic can continue to apply to thoughts, though not to propositions.

Anti-realist implications begin to creep in, however, where Collingwood’s account requires an explanation of how a proposition yields truth or falsity in a question-function. It seems that a question-and-answer complex is true or false depending on whether the answer to the question is right or wrong. But this leaves rightness and wrongness unexplained. They can’t be explained in terms of the truth or falsity of the answer, since truth and falsity only belong to the question-and-answer complexes.

One possible explanation of rightness might be as follows: a right answer is a justifiable answer. We need no recourse to the concept of truth to explain justifiability: an answer is justifiable if it meets with certain standards embodied in our social and linguistic practices. Thus for Collingwood a proposition can contribute truth to a question-function by being a justifiable answer to the question; it can be (though it may not in fact be) shown to be worthy of acceptance according to some standard. Meanwhile wrongness can be explained in terms of an answer’s being capable of being shown worthy of rejection. This is not said explicitly by Collingwood, so far as I know, but it seems a plausible option; at least I can’t think of a better explanation of rightness and wrongness in answers to questions.

If this is right, then Collingwood’s theory of meaning is a justificationist theory – the classic recipe for anti-realism in Dummett’s sense. Question-answer complexes will be true in virtue of the answer’s being right, meaning (roughly) it can be shown to be worthy of acceptance; they will be false in virtue of the answer’s being wrong, meaning (roughly) it can be shown to be worthy of rejection. A truth-value gap will appear if an answer cannot be decidedly shown worthy of either acceptance or rejection. Negation will function non-classically where there is a difference between being able to show that an answer is not worthy of rejection (~~Q?(a)) and being able to show that it is worthy of acceptance (Q?(a)). Obviously this all needs a lot more working out.

]]>https://originofspecious.wordpress.com/2016/09/05/collingwoods-revolution-in-logic/feed/0axdouglasOn Money and Defining Thingshttps://originofspecious.wordpress.com/2016/08/25/on-money-and-defining-things/
https://originofspecious.wordpress.com/2016/08/25/on-money-and-defining-things/#commentsThu, 25 Aug 2016 09:07:49 +0000http://originofspecious.wordpress.com/?p=8327]]>There is a technical point that I left out of my last post.

Smit et al seek to identify the feature of money that makes it money. They reject its function as a unit of account and a store of value as being “important empirical facts about money, but not constitutive or individuating.” (330)

What does “constitutive or individuating” mean here? When Smit et al rule out a certain function as being constitutive of money, they show either that something could function in that way and still not be money or that something could be money and yet not function in that way. And when they settle on a definition, it is of the form: “x is money if and only if Fx”. It appears, then, they they regard the form of that definition to ensure that the property F is constitutive or individuating. They rule out candidates for F on the grounds that they cannot be placed in such a statement yielding truth.

But this is far from adequate. Many expressions, describing features of money, could be substituted for F in that statement. Are they all “constitutive or individuating” features of money?

Suppose it happened, as a matter of historical contingency, that everything we rightly call “money” traced its history back to some original institution (this is highly doubtful, but suppose it were true). Then “traces its history back to the original institution” could be substituted for F in Smit et al’s definition of money. But it does not seem constitutive or individuating; history could have worked out differently so that money was invented independently in different places and at different times.

We could avoid this problem by attaching a modal operator to Smit et al’s definition. Then we have: [](Mx <-> Fx). Is that enough?

I don’t believe so. What Smit et al are (sans phrase) enquiring after, I believe, is the essence of money. And I agree with Kit Fine, that “the notion of essence which is of central importance to the metaphysics of identity is not to be understood in modal terms or even to be regarded as extensionally equivalent to a modal notion.”

Assuming that what we are looking for is a constitutive property, and that “constitutive” is not just a synonym for “coextensive”, then on the modalised account we still get false positives. Something is money if and only if Midas would love it. Or perhaps something is money if and only if it is easy to confuse with near-money substitutes. Or if and only if it is the root of all evil, or it and a fool are soon parted, etc. These properties, perhaps, can be substituted for F, preserving the truth of the definition. But they are coextensive with the property of being money, not constitutive of it.

If I were to locate the flaw of Smit et al’s test, it would be in its symmetry: [](Mx <-> Fx) trivially entails [](Fx <-> Mx). To me there is something wrong with saying that while being a medium of exchange is constitutive of being money, being money is also constitutive of being a medium of exchange. I have no argument for this, but maybe I can provoke agreement with the following consideration. The sense of “constitute” in use here seems to match D in the Lewis and Short entry for “constituere“: “to fix, appoint something (for or to something), to settle, agree upon, define, determine.” This suggests asymmetry: x’s possession or non-possession of F decides the case about whether x qualifies as M; x’s possession or non-possession of F cannot then hang on whether x qualifies as M.

To say what constitutes something’s being money, I propose, is to give the essence of money. If the essence of M consists in being F, then the converse does not hold, even though it might well be that anything that is M must also be F and vice-versa. Essence is thus hyperintentional (no, not “hyperintensional” – see Geach, Reference and Generality, 157n.)

But this means we can’t decide on essence by the tried-and-true analytic method of looking for obviously false counterexamples. There are many functions associated with being money, perhaps exclusively associated with it. These are merely coextensive not essential or constitutive. What makes an institution money is a purpose, not necessarily represented in the minds of agents (few purposes are), but embodied in the institution. I gloss “embodied” as: coinciding as both the formal and the final cause of the institution – acting as its “primary cause” (Arist. Metaphys. 983a26). Looking for this is something that would have come naturally to most philosophers before the twentieth century. We postlapsarians will have to do our best.

]]>https://originofspecious.wordpress.com/2016/08/25/on-money-and-defining-things/feed/3axdouglasBut Is It Money?https://originofspecious.wordpress.com/2016/08/24/but-is-it-money/
https://originofspecious.wordpress.com/2016/08/24/but-is-it-money/#commentsWed, 24 Aug 2016 07:48:03 +0000http://originofspecious.wordpress.com/?p=8001]]>Thanks to Mike Otsuka for pointing me towards a new article by Smit, Buekens, and Du Plessis in the Journal of Institutional Economics, which addresses the vexed question what is money?

Here is the first part of the abstract:

What does being money consist in? We argue that something is money if, and only if, it is typically acquired in order to realise the reduction in transaction costs that accrues in virtue of agents coordinating on acquiring the same thing when deciding what thing to acquire in order to exchange.

In giving that answer, Smit et al explicitly reject John Searle’s proposal, that “an object is money if it is collectively counted as money among a group of agents” (329). Their reasoning is: people debate whether bitcoin (e.g.) counts as money. Searle’s view seems to imply then that bitcoin is money for some people and isn’t money for others. But:

This, however, is not very satisfactory. It seems to leave a basic theoretical itch unscratched and to miss the degree to which the people who dispute such things take themselves to differ on some substantive issue. (329)

The authors go on:

A more compelling answer to whether bitcoins are money would be to identify some theoretically interesting, explanatory characteristic shared by those things we uncontroversially consider to be ‘money’ and to see if bitcoin has the characteristic in question. (330)

They then examine three proposed characteristics. Money:

functions as a medium of exchange

functions as a store of value

functions as unit of account

They then rule out 2 and 3 by pointing to counterexamples. People often hold money even when it depreciates in value; we do not therefore say it isn’t money. So 2 is out. 3 is ruled out by a more elaborate and hypothetical counterexample, in which inflation renders a currency inappropriate as a unit of account, but it is still used to settle payments (sellers quote prices in some unit other than the currency, to avoid menu costs, and then calculate the currency-price at the point of exchange).

This leaves 1. But “medium of exchange” isn’t very informative, so the authors spell it out in more detail. First we should recognise that “the transaction costs incurred by an economic agent decrease as a function of the amount of agents that she transacts with that transact in the same currency.” (330)

This is a reference to the old “double coincidence of wants” problem associated with barter societies. Money is more convenient than barter, which is what we would have if we didn’t have money. This is the textbook story of the function of money; here it is in a textbook (Samuelson and Nordhaus, 2010, 459):

This leads the authors to their definition of money:

something is money among a group of interacting agents if, and only if, it is typically acquired in order to realise the reduction in transaction costs that accrues in virtue of such agents coordinating on acquiring the same thing when deciding what thing to acquire in order to exchange. (331)

Right away the authors clarify:

Note that we need not require that the agents in question understand their practice in such terms. The agents themselves may have all manner of false beliefs about their practice. Yet their practices are sustained, and their behaviour explained, by the fact that the adoption of a currency has such a coordinating function. (331)

My question here is whether money really does function to reduce transaction costs. It is important for the account above that a barter society is what we would have if we eliminated money. This is different from the question of whether there ever was a barter society in the past. What needs showing is that, given human psychology and social arrangements, the lack of an “agreed medium of exchange” in our society would give rise to the higher transaction costs of a barter society.

There are many other ways of avoiding those costs without money. One is to have a social convention such that anyone with an abundance of some good should share it with anyone in need. Thus you share your surplus wool with whoever needs it, and somebody else shares a spare axe with you. Barter isn’t necessary at all.

There are less benign ways also. One is just to steal what you need. This could have violent repercussions, and we might say that these are transaction costs in themselves. But that is not obvious: the violence might be constrained through conventions to minimise its real damage. It might even be enjoyable for participants.

I am not entirely making things up; there are examples in the anthropological literature of societies that look a little like both of those, and there are many, many others of different sorts. But my point here is only that we shouldn’t assume we just know what our society would be like – given our psychological dispositions and our other conventions – if we took away money. Do we really know that much about ourselves?

The crucial point, of which anthropologists have been trying to inform economists for decades, is that the institution of money changes us in fundamental ways. It changes how we think, what we value, how we interact with each other. Untune the string of money and who knows what discord, or concord, might follow? Maybe we would barter; maybe we would share; maybe we would steal. How can we know? What is the standard of evidence for judging that counterfactual?

Once we appreciate the range of possibilities here, we see right away that there are many other functions that money could serve besides the three examined by Smit et al. The MMT story, for instance, is that money serves the purpose of allowing the state to provision the public sector with labour and capital, without paying in kind. I am working on my own story, drawing on Bernard Laum and René Girard, according to which money serves a religious purpose of channelling human violence into ritual channels. A certain type of Marxist believes that money is an instrument of exploitation.

All of these stories suggest a picture of a non-monetary society. The difference between that society and ours is the cost (to some or all members of society) that money exists to reduce. Without money we might have an inconvenient barter society, or no public sector, or uncontrolled violence, or the overthrow of capitalism. We can’t discuss the function that money serves without discussing which of these pictures seems the most accurate.

Economists don’t engage on this question at all. They just assert without argument that a society without money would be a barter society with high transaction costs. Philosophers follow them on this point, I believe, out of a misplaced “naturalism”. The economists can elaborate their barter-into-money story with fancy game theoretic models and equations. What is in fact an unsubstantiated assertion is dressed in the trappings of the natural sciences. And philosophers in the early 20C got a big scolding for failing to bow low enough to the natural sciences.

The remedy is simply to recognise that there is no current science that could tell us with any certainty what our society would look like if we just deleted one of its central institutions. Thinking through the possibilities takes imagination. Economists are often unimaginative – I often wonder if the explosion of unnecessary mathematics is to compensate for a lack of inspiration. But philosophers don’t need to follow suit. On one point, at least, we don’t want to vindicate J.K. Galbraith:

These are the days when men of all social disciplines and all political faiths seek the comfortable and the accepted; when the man of controversy is looked upon as a disturbing influence; when originality is taken to be a mark of instability; and when, in minor modification of the original parable, the bland lead the bland.

]]>https://originofspecious.wordpress.com/2016/08/24/but-is-it-money/feed/10axdouglaschrismartenson_chapter6_whatismoneyScreen Shot 2016-08-24 at 08.21.42Descartes on the Syllogismhttps://originofspecious.wordpress.com/2016/07/16/descartes-on-the-syllogism/
https://originofspecious.wordpress.com/2016/07/16/descartes-on-the-syllogism/#commentsSat, 16 Jul 2016 08:59:13 +0000http://originofspecious.wordpress.com/?p=7726]]>Descartes made several criticisms of the syllogism. In the Discourse on Method, he remarks that “syllogisms … are of less use for learning things than for explaining to others the things one already knows”. This might lead us to think that Descartes’s main criticism is that syllogisms are non-ampliative. This is the general line pushed by Stephen Gaukroger in his Cartesian Logic. But arguably it presents Descartes as falling into ignoratio elenchi (“of all the fallacies, that which has the widest range”, as De Morgan claimed – Formal Logic, p.260).

No doubt the role of the syllogism was conceived variously by philosophers of Descartes’s time. Many regarded it as a purely didactic device. But it does not follow from the fact that it is non-ampliative that it must be constrained to that role. The power of non-ampliative knowledge can also be harnessed in a decision method. And Descartes, after all, was happy to use such knowledge for such a purpose. His own method of drawing out the consequences of innate ideas by intellectual intuition, in order to decide what is known for certain, seems a paradigm case of such an application. Nothing appears in the consequent that is not contained in the innate idea serving as antecedent. We might try to soften the non-ampliativity by saying that the consequent is only implicitly contained in the antecedent, but I don’t see why we can’t place the same qualification onto the claim that the consequent of a syllogism is contained in its antecedent.

In the Rules for the Direction of the Mind there is, I believe, a more substantive criticism of the syllogism as a decision method. A decision method is a formal test of validity. It is a reasonable requirement of such a method that applying it should not require one to know ahead of time whether the argument being tested is in fact valid. I see Descartes’s criticisms in the Rules as an attempt to show that the syllogistic fails to meet this requirement.

There are two steps in applying a formal decision method:

to present the argument under discussion in a way that makes its logical form perspicuous, and

to work out whether this form falls into the class of valid forms specified by the method.

One common criticism of the syllogistic is that it fails to provide an exhaustive class of valid forms. But this is arguably another ignoratio elenchi; the significant question is whether the syllogistic provides a legitimate way of determining whether an argument is valid-under-syllogism, in the same way that first order logic provides a decision method for determining whether an argument is valid-under-FOL. I propose that Descartes wanted to show that the traditional syllogistic does not even yield a way of deciding whether an argument is a valid syllogism.

The problems, in other words, are all with step 1 above. Here is what Descartes says in the Rules:

Some will perhaps be surprised that in this context, where we are searching for ways of making ourselves more skilful at deducing some truths on the basis of others, we make no mention of any of the precepts with which dialecticians suppose they govern human reason. They prescribe certain forms of reasoning in which the conclusions follow with such irresistible necessity that if our reason relies on them, even though it takes, as it were, a rest from considering a particular inference clearly and attentively, it can nevertheless draw a conclusion which is certain simply in virtue of the form. But, as we have noticed, truth often slips through these fetters, while those who employ them are left entrapped in them. (Rule 10)

I think most readers of Descartes have interpreted this as a distinct criticism from the one he makes in the Discourse, and which he appears to repeat further on in Rule 10: “dialecticians are unable to formulate a syllogism with a true conclusion unless they are already in possession of the substance of the conclusion, i.e. unless they have previous knowledge of the very truth deduced in the syllogism.” I propose that they are the same criticism. If we take the second criticism to be, again, a complaint that the syllogism is non-ampliative, we are overlooking the fact that Descartes has earlier been quite clear that the stated purpose of the syllogistic is not to make discoveries but rather to test for the validity of arguments purely on the basis of their form.

The truth deduced in the syllogism is not the consequence of the syllogism. As Łukasiewicz pointed out, the traditional Aristotelian syllogism is in the form of a true hypothetical proposition, not an inference-pattern. A first figure syllogism, for instance, can be: if MaP and SaM then SaP. It cannot be: MaP, SaM ⊢ SaP. The syllogistic is a method for determining the truth of hypothetical statements, not the truth of the consequents of such hypothetical statements. And so when Descartes says that the substance of the conclusion of the syllogism must be known ahead of time before it is revealed by the syllogistic, I take him to mean that the truth of the hypothetical proposition that is the syllogism – the validity of the argument – must be known ahead of time. The syllogistic fails as a test of validity, not as a method for discovering truths.

But why would the validity of an argument need to be known ahead of time for the syllogistic to be successfully applied? Here Descartes’s comments about truth slipping through the fetters while dialecticians remain trapped in them must be borne in mind. Descartes could have spared us a lot of misunderstanding by giving examples, but examples are given in that great pioneering work of Cartesian logic, the Port-Royal Logic (Part 3, Chapter 9). Here is one:

The Divine Law commands that we honour kings.

Louis XIV is a king.

Therefore the divine law commands that we honour Louis XIV.

This argument is clearly valid. But does the syllogistic help us to see that it is? Remember that the first step in applying the decision method is to make the logical form perspicuous. The PRL imagines a poor logic student identifying the terms of the syllogism as follows:

S = The Divine Law commands that we honour

M = king(s)

P = Louis XIV

If we identify the terms in that way, then the syllogistic rules the argument invalid. The form appears to be: SiM / PiM | SiP, which is not a valid second-figure form, since it contains only affirmative propositions.

Now because we know the argument is valid, we know that something must have gone wrong in identifying the terms. But to identify them correctly, we need to rewrite the original argument in natural language into a logically equivalent form:

Kings must be honoured (according to the Divine Law).

Louis XIV is a king.

Therefore Louis XIV must be honoured (according to the Divine Law).

Now we can assign the terms as follows:

M = king(s)

P = must be honoured

S = Louis XIV

Now the form of the syllogism is MaP / SiM | SiP. That is a valid first figure syllogism.

This is an example of “truth slipping through the fetters” of the syllogistic. What was required to make the argument fit into the form of a valid syllogism was a rearrangement in natural language, so that the terms could be properly assigned. But it wasn’t the syllogistic that told us such a rearrangement was necessary, nor that the proposed rearrangement was logically equivalent to the original argument. If we hadn’t known those things, we might have accepted the verdict of the syllogistic in the first instance and ruled the argument invalid. And that would be an example of dialecticians being trapped in the fetters of the syllogistic.

Now in this case we could reply that the mistake in formalising the syllogism above was that we got the quantity assignment in the wrong place. If “the Divine Law commands that we honour kings” means “the Divine Law commands that we honour all kings”, and if we assign “kings” as the middle term, then we must put the syllogism into a form where M is in the subject place of at least one proposition (so it can’t be a second-figure syllogism). But the PRL gives other examples that are even more troubling, for instance the invalid argument: We should follow Scripture; tradition is not Scripture; thus we should not follow tradition. (It is, of course, no coincidence that the PRL chooses examples of reasoning that have enormous and contentious political and religious implications – what they are concerned to build is a logic that can help us to think when it matters the most.) In this case, if we wrongly assign “we” to S, “should believe Scripture” / “Scripture” to M, and “tradition” to P, we can appear to get a valid second-figure form: SaM / PeM | SeP.

Obviously the error here is to treat “Scripture” and “should believe Scripture” as synonymous and thus to identify both as a single middle term. But the syllogistic itself provides no rules of synonymy. We need knowledge from outside the syllogistic to know how to apply the syllogistic.

One might find it hard to imagine that we could know how to properly assign terms, so as to apply syllogistic analysis to an argument, without already knowing whether that argument is valid. That, I believe, is what Descartes thought, and that is what he meant when he claimed that dialecticians are unable to formulate a syllogism with a true conclusion without already possessing the substance of the conclusion.

]]>https://originofspecious.wordpress.com/2016/07/16/descartes-on-the-syllogism/feed/1axdouglas2000px-square_of_opposition_set_diagrams-svgInevitable Brexit Posthttps://originofspecious.wordpress.com/2016/06/26/inevitable-brexit-post/
https://originofspecious.wordpress.com/2016/06/26/inevitable-brexit-post/#commentsSun, 26 Jun 2016 19:55:20 +0000http://originofspecious.wordpress.com/?p=7131]]>I am a citizen of Portugal. My mother is from Macau and was born there when it was still under Portuguese control. She went through the long and difficult process of claiming her Portuguese citizenship so that I could have it through legacy. This allows me to live and work in the UK without having to apply for visas every few years (my other passport is Australian).

The process of gaining Portuguese citizenship was long, arduous, and expensive. But the Portuguese government treated us ex-colonials with respect and dignity. It was worlds apart from the way I was treated by the UK Border Agency when I tried to apply for visas as an Australian.

The UKBA treats applicants like criminals. It makes it impossible to speak with anyone in the system. The forms warn that any attempts to contact the agency will not be successful but will result in delays to the processing of your application. The agency is fortified within a labyrinth of Kafkaesque runarounds. It charges outrageous fees. The process of bringing in dependents or applying for spousal visas requires submission to humiliating and invasive examinations.

The UKBA also rejects every application it possibly can by creative interpretation of the laws. A friend of mine had his application rejected because his pen mark went too far outside one of the boxes he ticked. One of mine was rejected because I included the wrong page on one of twenty bank statements I had to send with the application. When your application is rejected, you are told that you have 28 days to leave the country. You are not told that you are allowed to appeal the decision and provide the right documentation (or send another form with all the ticks exactly the correct size). I had to ring a lawyer to find this out. The UKBA also warns that the appeal process can take months. You are not informed that you cannot be deported while the appeal is pending – again, I needed a lawyer to tell me this.

When I had sent in the correct page on my bank statement, my application was eventually accepted after appeal. But from that point onwards, I could never cross the UK border without being made to wait while an agent investigated my sordid past of illegal immigration. I must say that every agent apologised to me after finding out the truth but told me that they are obliged to investigate any visa that has a ‘flag’ on it.

Strangely enough, I still have this problem when entering the UK on my Portuguese passport, since the UKBA has linked together my EU passport with my Australian one. I am told this is (was!) in direct contravention of its treaty obligations to the EU, but that is a different story.

My immigration story is incredibly benign compared with others I have heard. I have heard of people being detained, deported, and fined for the most absurd imaginable reasons. I have heard of children being separated from their families. I have heard worse than that.

Immigration was a core issue in the EU Referendum, possibly the deciding issue. Intelligent people have argued that one advantage of leaving the EU is that Britain will be able to pick and choose its immigrants rather than having them forced upon it. My friend Neil Wilson has made this argument eloquently.

Neil claims that “every other advanced civilised nation on earth, outside the EU” runs a points-based system of selective immigration. I respectfully disagree. Face down the Australian Department of Immigration or the US Department of Homeland Security and tell me if you see evidence of civilisation.

I see a process that is deliberately made as expensive and dehumanising as possible. At times I barely managed it, and I am well off and a native speaker of English, with friends in high places. I cannot imagine what it would be like for somebody less privileged.

Do I believe in open borders? No. I believe, as Michael Dummett argued (please read his book), that just as anyone prosecuted for a crime should be treated as innocent until proven guilty, anyone seeking to migrate to a nation should be treated as legitimate until proven otherwise. We should not be treated as criminals trying to prove our innocence.

Now let me explain one reason why I voted for Britain to remain in the EU. The inhumanity of the UKBA and its counterparts in other nations did not emerge out of nothing. Such procedures are brought in on a wave of popular support, among native populations that always will harbour resentment against immigrants – including the ‘good’ (high point-scoring) sort of immigrants: fancypantses like me with higher degrees, often mixed ethnicity, middle-class jobs, and the requisite impressive bank balance. This popular resentment will always be a rich seam from which votes can be mined. The television stations make documentaries about heavily armed border guards chasing foreigners around, and the native populations squeal with delight. When one nation does it to the immigrants of another nation, that nation retaliates in kind. An accelerating arms race of nastiness between the UKBA and the Australian Department of Immigration has got us to where we are today. Immigrants become cannon fodder in a battle of national egos.

There is one and only one way to escape this vicious cycle. It is for nations to give up their sovereignty over immigration and enter into mutually binding international agreements, overseen by transnational bodies not subject to the ugly identity politics from which no national government can escape on its own. Nations must compromise on core principles of immigration to which they can all agree. The EU’s Free Movement of People might not have been the right principle, and I personally disagreed with its approach to non-EU migrants. But that is a matter that should have been argued within the EU Parliament or, in the ideal case, a Parliament of all the stakeholder nations.

Neil argues that: “People want nations for the same reason they want family and not just friends. People like their friends but want to live with their family – behind their own front door. Demonising nations is like demonising family, and needs to stop.”

I strongly repudiate the analogy. We all struggle to get on with our families at times, but if you’re lucky enough to have a good family you know they’ll always be there for you when you need them most. Nations are not like this. The ex-industrial regions of England needed the more affluent regions to support them during the 1980s. Instead they got Thatcher telling them they weren’t getting their grubby hands anywhere near the family jewels, to wild popular acclaim. The resentment builds to boiling point, and the only escape valve for it blows straight through the hearts of immigrants and their families. That is what we have just seen. I’m sorry for being unoriginal, but it is true.

For that matter, I don’t like Westminster MPs making decisions that affect my life.

But you know who I really, REALLY don’t want making decisions that affect my life?

The general public of Britain and the Commonwealth nations.

]]>https://originofspecious.wordpress.com/2016/06/22/thoughts-on-direct-democracy/feed/2axdouglasSome explanation on my last posthttps://originofspecious.wordpress.com/2016/06/20/some-explanation-on-my-last-post/
https://originofspecious.wordpress.com/2016/06/20/some-explanation-on-my-last-post/#commentsMon, 20 Jun 2016 14:45:54 +0000http://originofspecious.wordpress.com/?p=6964]]>I was extremely surprised and touched by the supportive responses I had on my previous post where I declared my intention not to blog about economics anymore.

I had no idea how many people took an interest in my blog. I was also flattered by having very intelligent people write to tell me that my contributions are valued. Some even asked me if I was doing ok. I am moved by all this show of support.

I suppose what has happened is that I feel that I’ve run up against a problem I don’t know how to solve.

When I met Warren Mosler, I noticed how often he uses the phrase “the public purpose”. I think it’s a very good phrase – John Kenneth Galbraith’s Economics and the Public Purpose is likewise a very good book. But to use it opens up some deep philosophical questions. I have every intention of continuing to think and write about these questions. But I no longer think (if I ever thought it) that economics is the right way to approach them.

The questions are: What is the public purpose? Who gets to decide what it is? And what institutions are required to serve it?

It is good to make logical arguments in favour of certain answers to these questions. But they’re for everyone to think about, not for me to pontificate upon. Speaking to people in Britain has revealed to me that I just don’t know what people want.

Almost everybody here in the UK complains about greedy, corrupt bankers. Mosler has a very simple policy outline: give banks a list of what they can do – what serves the public purpose – and ban them from doing anything else. Ban them from taking financial assets as collateral, from selling debt to third parties, and other things that are not in the public purpose. Yet this direct and simple solution has zero uptake in the UK. Nobody writes about it in the newspapers. I haven’t heard a single politician even mention it. And activist organisations specifically focussed on banking reform, such as Positive Money UK, are fixated on far more radical solutions that seem aimed atcentralising and consolidating the power of banking interests rather than regulating it.

Again, almost everybody here says they want people off welfare and into work and that they want better public services. There is obviously a very simple way of solving both problems at once: offer public sector jobs to anyone currently on welfare who would rather work for a living wage. Again, zero uptake in the UK. Instead, a growing number of people support the idea of a universal basic income. So almost the whole population thinks that one problem for the UK is too many people on welfare and too few people in work, and then half of them think the solution is just to take away the welfare while the other half think it’s to give welfare to everybody. Almost nobody thinks the solution is to offer work to the people on welfare. I just don’t get it.

Neil Wilson suggested to me that maybe it’s politics rather than economics that I don’t understand. I think it’s deeper than that: I just don’t understand the British public. They say they want a banking system that doesn’t just serve the greed of the few. Ok, here’s how to make banking work in the interests of the many instead. No interest. They say they want people to have the chance to work rather than living on government handouts. Ok, here’s how to effect that change simply and straightforwardly. No interest.

I know what I think the public purpose should be. But I have no idea what people in general think it is. And clearly I can’t take what they say they think it is at face value, since they completely ignore the most obvious policies for bringing that about.

To explain my previous point about MMT: I don’t think the problem is that people don’t understand how government spending works. The two policies above don’t even seem like they’d be particularly costly – not in comparison with the status quo. So it’s not that people think they would like these things but believe them to be unaffordable (look at the number of people that support universal basic income). The problem is much deeper and weirder. Are the policies too good – too effective at serving what the public declares to be the public purpose? Are the British worried they might not have enough to complain about if such things are implemented? I just don’t know.

Until I work this out, I don’t know how to contribute anymore. Any help is greatly appreciated.